GECOM: A Chairman without a commission and a costly burden on taxpayers

Jan 30, 2026 Letters

Dear Editor,

Guyana’s electoral system has been reduced to an expensive and dangerous absurdity, engineered by the deliberate actions of GECOM’s Claudette Singh”.

By unilaterally bringing the life of the Elections Commission to an end, Justice (Ret’d) Singh dismantled the very institution she was appointed to protect. GECOM is constitutionally designed to function as a collective, bipartisan body. Once that Commission ceased to exist, the Chairperson’s role became effectively redundant.

Yet, despite this reality, she remains firmly in office—drawing an estimated $3 million per month in taxpayers’ money while presiding over no Commission at all. This is not merely poor optics; it is a blatant waste of public funds. Guyanese are being asked to accept rising living costs, tighter public spending, and “fiscal responsibility,” while millions of dollars are paid monthly to sustain a chairmanship with nothing to chair. In any serious democracy, such an arrangement would trigger immediate resignation or intervention. In Guyana, it has been normalised.

Even more alarming is what this has enabled. With the Commission deliberately neutralised, the Chief Elections Officer has emerged as the de facto Chair of GECOM, exercising enormous control over the institution’s operations, agenda, and decision-making—without oversight, balance, or accountability. An administrative officer, never intended to wield such power, now effectively runs the country’s electoral machinery.

This concentration of authority did not happen by accident. It is the direct consequence of the Chairperson’s actions. By ending the Commission’s life and clinging to office, Justice Singh has created a vacuum in which unchecked power thrives—while she continues to collect a salary funded by the very citizens whose democratic rights are being imperiled.

The public must now ask: what exactly are taxpayers paying for? There is no functioning Commission, no collective oversight, and no justification for maintaining a highly paid chairmanship under these circumstances. This is not governance; it is exploitation of public patience and public money.

Until the Commission is properly reconstituted, the continued payment of millions of dollars to sustain this hollow office is indefensible. Democracy cannot be safeguarded by a lone chair and an empowered CEO operating in a constitutional void. The cost to taxpayers is real. The cost to democracy may be far greater.

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